Review by Booklist Review
Like many writers who survived the horrors of World War II, and in the case of Eastern European and Russian poets, Stalinism, Nobel laureate Szymborska insists on clarity and directness in her writing, and evinces, too, a ready wit and a wholly personal point of view. Her poetry is treasured the world over, but unbeknownst to most American readers, Szymborska is also a literary columnist, and several decades' worth of her brilliantly arch and pithy essays are deftly translated and gathered in this pleasurable volume in all their vivacious unpredictability and radiant intelligence. Refusing to do the dutiful work of a reviewer or critic, Szymborska freely revels in reading books, which she describes as "the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised." Following her fancy, Szymborska writes with verve and imagination about books on plate tectonics, wallpaper, birds, gladiators, Vermeer, Ella Fitzgerald, hugs, plants, and our "cosmic solitude" as the only planet fizzing with life. Szymborska enters each essay at an oblique and thrillingly subversive angle, and exits with a dazzling flourish, having coolly yet profoundly altered her readers' perceptions. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Szymborska's Nobel Prize for literature in 1996 recognized her achievement in poetry. This collection of short prose responses ("I couldn't write reviews and didn't even want to") to 94 books proves a luminous and inspiring set of readerly reports-sharp, digressive, joyous-that provide insight into the poet's process of intake and synthesis. The pieces don't so much describe the books in question as take off from them, riffing and meditating on their contents. "The world is full of all sorts of sleeping powers-but how can you know in advance which may be safely released and which should be kept under lock at all costs?" she asks after reading Karel Capek's 1936 novel The War with the Newts, a sort of 1984 meets The Lord of the Flies. "One hundred minutes for your own beauty? Every day? You can't always indulge in such luxuries, my dear vain, dizzy, professionally employed, married friend with children," is her wry response to One Hundred Minutes for Beauty by Zofia Wedrowska, fourth edition, Warsaw: Sport I Turystyka, 1978. "We all know that a gesture repeated too often grows trite and loses its deeper meaning," she writes of Kathleen Keating's A Little Book of Hugs, but notes that "Miss Keating is an American, and enthusiasm comes to her more easily." Readers will find it comes just as easily to them via this varied collection by a keen reader and thinker. (Oct.) Forecast: While the conceit of a commonplace book of reader responses may be a little quirky, expect strong, explanatory national reviews (along with the diffuse interest in any Nobel laureate) to generate sales. This may very well be the season's sleeper hit among literati, particularly among non-regular readers of poetry who nevertheless recognize Szymborska's name. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Actually, this is required reading from Poland's Nobel laureate, who here gives us essays to balance her great poetry. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Nobel laureate Szymborska (Miracle Fair, 2001, etc.) reprints nearly a hundred pithy pieces about books from her many years as a newspaper columnist in Poland. But don't call them reviews. "I am and wish to remain a reader, an amateur, and a fan," the poet writes. "Anyone insisting on reviews' will incur my displeasure." Fair enough. In these brief nonreviews, Szymborska uses her eclectic reading habits to comment on everything from witchcraft trials to wall calendars. She does not, indeed, say much about the quality of the books at hand, nor does she often regurgitate or recommend. What she does do is allow her reading to jump-start her philosopher's mind, her humorist's imagination, and her poet's pen. Irony abounds. In a piece about scientists, she quips, "From time to time people do appear who have a particularly strong resistance to obvious facts." Along the way she takes on Carl Jung (didn't he realize that people were telling him stories, not dreams?), beauty-obsessed women, deer hunters, biographers, autobiographers, poets overly interested in prosody, extraterrestrials, wax museums, Disney, tyrants' abuses of history, anti-smokers (she's a proud puffer), nudity, and home repair. Here are piquant disquisitions on the mysteries of talent (Hitchcock is her exemplar), on the poetry of Czelaw Milosz (which she greatly appreciates), on the absurdities of pseudo-science. She admires Thomas Mann and Samuel Pepys but mistrusts Dale Carnegie, wonders about the daily lives of Neanderthals, expatiates on the beauties of Polish birds and Andersen's fairy tales, speculates about the meaning of life and death to a paramecium, worries about violence and about the psychological demands we make of our dogs. She recognizes that home-improvement books are wasted on the practically challenged, constructs a hilarious verbal family tree of Cleopatra, and observes that the three pictographs forming the word "peace" in Chinese are "already a microscopic poem." Glorious distillations of a capacious mind and heart.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
